which banner he directed four horror/ suspense films for the proposed Reteitalia TV-movie series Alta tensione. These included Testimone oculare (“Eye- witness”), Il principe del terrore (“The Master of Terror”), and two outstand- ing pictures that represent his finest solo work to date, Il gioko 8
(“School of
Fear”) and—a film of particular inter- est—L’uomo che non voleva morire (“The Man Who Didn’t Want to Die”), based on the Giorgio Scerbanenco story which Mario had unsuccessfully tried to film in the early 1970s.
“Mario wrote a script together with Rafael Azcona,” Lamberto remembers. “It was supposed to be a big movie, but it didn’t get made. Many years later, I took the unfilmed script and made a TV movie out of it.” Azcona, a novelist and screen- writer since the late 1950s, is best remembered for writing the Marco Ferreri films Una storia moderna/The Conjugal Bed and La donna scimmia/ The Ape Woman (both 1963), La Grande Bouffe (1973), and Ciao maschio/Bye Bye Monkey (1978), and Fernando Trueba’s Belle Époque (1992). The unrelenting, darkly ironic quality of Azcona’s work makes it most regrettable that his collaboration with Mario was never realized. Working from a script by Gianfranco Clerici (Lucio Fulci’s Non si sevizia un paperino/Don’t Torture the Duckling, Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust), Lamberto rose to the occasion and produced an excel- lent, hard-hitting crime thriller worthy of comparison to Cani arrabbiati. Un- fortunately, the Alta tenzione series never made it to air, and the four films that ANFRI produced for it, including L’uomo che non voleva morire and Il gioko, were given scant television release at best. Lamberto’s next project found him moving onto hallowed ground: a color remake—in name only, re- ally—of La maschera del demonio (1988), scripted by Massimo De Rita. The Reteitalia production was more faithful to Gogol’s “Viy” than Mario
DARIO ARGENTO, Lamberto Bava, and cameraman Gianlorenzo Battaglia film the air vent sequence of DEMONI with actress Fiore Argento.
